For people making payroll, by people making payroll
For people making payroll, by people making payroll
August 31st, 2009
One of Conditioned Air’s customers sent us a nice thank-you letter. A couple of months later I was talking to him, and he mentioned he was a tad disappointed that we hadn’t followed up with him.
In our business we want to look for any reason to “touch” the customer. The more we are in contact with a customer, the more opportunities they have to see what kind of company we are.
So I went to each of our office staff and explained that anytime we have an opportunity to touch a customer, we need to seize it:
Sit down right now and write down five different opportunities you have to “touch” your customers. Then train your staff and follow up to make sure they are taking advantage of every opportunity.
Popularity: 38% [?]
Posted in Customer Service | Comments Off
August 22nd, 2009
You want to increase your sales? There are only three ways to do it:
So when you’re trying to figure out how to sell more, focus on these three things. If you can’t see clearly how some new idea will help one (or more) of those three things, toss it. It’s a waste of time.
Let’s look at each in a little more detail:
1. Selling to more customers is all about increasing traffic. Adding new customers is probably the first thing people think of when they put on their ‘marketing’ cap. It’s great to have more customers. But it’s not the only way to increase your sales, and it’s not always the best way.
Crazy? Not really. We talk a lot here about customer service. Paying proper attention to every facet of your interaction with your customers really sets you apart. But the more customers you have to deal with, the harder and more expensive this is to do well.
Acquiring new customers is pretty expensive, too. Estimates range from 2x to 7x the cost for acquiring a new customer versus retaining an old one. Don’t forget your existing customers are a valuable asset to you.
2. Selling more to each customer will allow you to sell more without increasing your customer service load from the higher number of relationships. Your existing customers buy from you because they’ve already decided that they like or trust you, or what you sell. They’ve already chosen you over your competition, so why not take advantage of that and offer them some more things they can buy from you?
Now, a little caution is in order: you have to stay focused on what you do well. Just because someone likes your ladies’ hat store, that doesn’t mean you should also open up an auto parts section inside. But within the “what you do well” arena, is there more you could do without significantly altering your business or your processes? Zappo’s started out selling shoes, then added handbags. Shoes and handbags don’t look much alike, but they share a lot of characteristics important to Zappo’s business: easy to ship, good margins, and huge overlap among the customer bases.
Your job is to think about who already buys from you, find out what they want (which you can do by asking them), and see if you can sell them some of that, too.
3. Selling more often to each customer is about frequency. Even with people that like you and what you do or sell, it’s easy to forget you’re there. One of the most important things you can do to keep a past customer a future customer is to find ways to remind them you’re there (without annoying them).
Lots of retail stores have sales for just this reason. They’re not really eager to get less for what they sell (that sort of violates #2 above), but they’ve learned that people are almost always happy to be contacted about a chance to save some money.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with running sales (there’s a lot that is wrong with how it’s normally done, but that’s another post some day). But you don’t want to sell less in return for more often. What you need to be thinking about is how to bring your customer into your store more often without bribing them to come there.
That’s it: only three things. Find ways to increase each of them without sacrificing either of the others. Increase all three together and Good Things will happen.
Popularity: 56% [?]
Tags: marketing, sales
Posted in Marketing and Selling | Comments Off
August 17th, 2009
Here’s an easy way to prospect for new business that doesn’t require cold calling, “confrontation”, or selling.
When you leave a restaurant, coffee shop, etc., just leave your business card on the table. I left this one at an Atlanta Bread Company after a meeting there.
Sure, it will get tossed, over and over, until the time it doesn’t. That time, someone who needs what you do will see it, take it, and contact you. [Wait: does your business card give a pretty clear idea of what you do? If not, this may not work for you until you get some better business cards. What else do you want a business card to do?]
That’s what it’s about: getting your name and your service in front of lots of people until you find a person who needs what you do. To them, it’s not selling, it’s a solution to a problem.
Successful businesspeople are always marketing, always selling. Not the smarmy, in-your-face, buy-this-from-me-right-now kind, but finding ways to let people know what they do and who they are, so that people who need them can find them.
This one habit won’t make you successful by itself. But if you do as many things like this as you can think of, over and over, that will.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Tags: business card, marketing
Posted in Marketing and Selling | 2 Comments »
August 8th, 2009
Becky McCray at Small Biz Survival recently asked if the Yellow Pages still matter for local businesses. It ends with some valuable lessons, including this one:
If you do advertise, track your results. And don’t fall into the “just one more year” trap. If it doesn’t generate enough business to pay for itself, kill the ad.
We’ve wondered whether we were spending too much on our Yellow Pages and Yellow Book ads (the two directories available here in Huntsville, AL). Because the Yellow Book is less popular, I had decided to drop its ads, and was considering a smaller Yellow Pages ad, too. After all, phone book usage appears to be declining, and how many calls could we be getting from the second-place phone book? Right?
Before we gave our rep the bad news, Ryan decided to check our Switchvox incoming call logs. In a moment of unusual cleverness, we’d used a different phone number in our Yellow Book ad this year, so we knew calls to that number had to come from Yellow Book users.
What we found proved once again that you shouldn’t trust your instincts if you have any way to measure instead.
It turns out we were averaging 9 calls per week to the Conditioned Air Yellow Book number and 5 calls per week to the Focus Electric number. Wow! That’s around 60 calls per month.
While it’s not perfect (some of those may have already been planning to call us and just picked up that book to find the number), 60 calls per month for what we were paying was a great deal. So instead of dropping the Yellow Book ads, we’re even adding Greenway Plumbing to it this year.
None of this means we disagree with the Small Biz Blog piece’s major premise. The evidence is unavoidable that print directories are becoming less relevant each year. We’d hate to be in that business.
But the moral of this story — like so many others — is you really don’t know what’s happening until you measure it.
Popularity: 63% [?]
Posted in Marketing and Selling | 4 Comments »
August 3rd, 2009
When I wrote the Top 10 Reasons to choose Conditioned Air Solutions, the one I may have been the most passionate about was #6 – “we want your feedback”.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that whenever I get great service I usually find that I have an easy way to give the business feedback. I recently visited Sweet Peppers Deli for the first time and it was great! Friendly people, clean place, great food, excellent service…and sure enough, a postage paid comment card on each table with plenty of room for me to tell them as much or as little as I liked. And just as sure, on Ryan’s not-so-positive eating experience a while back, there was no card for him to fill out.
“That’s great”, you may be thinking, “but how do I do that for my business?” That’s why we’re here today: to see exactly how you can start getting regular feedback from your customers. I’m going to show you how both Sweet Peppers (from my customer perspective) and Conditioned Air (from my business owner perspective) do it, and some of the thinking behind that.
Both start with an old fashioned tool: a post card. Let’s take a look at Sweet Peppers’:
Note a few important things while you think about what you want to ask your own customers:
I’m not sure how this could be much easier for me as a customer, and that’s critical: the easier it is for them, the more feedback you’ll receive.
Now let’s look at Conditioned Air’s:
The first thing you may notice is the differences in the cards that are driven by the differences in our businesses. When we designed our card, some of our goals were general and some specific to our business:
If you think you need something like this for your business, here is exactly how to implement your own customer feedback system in the form of a post card. But first, a warning: if you do this halfway you’ll do more damage than good. If you don’t have the ability to regularly deliver the cards to your customers, or if you can’t consistently follow up on any negative comments, or if you aren’t able (or willing) to actually take the feedback to heart and make changes, then don’t do it. But if you can do these things, then here we go:
This isn’t rocket science, but it does require a bit of organization, discipline, and a desire to get better. If you have those you can have a steady way to improve both your customer relations and your performance.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Posted in Customer Service, Marketing and Selling | 3 Comments »
